Saturday, November 27, 2010

Hype: Necropolis

I figured I would feature another game that's still in development since getting games a little bit of hype before they drop is pretty important and since the last blog seemed to go down pretty well. I hope you all managed to get a look at Bit Bonton because it really does look like it is shaping up to be a good game!

Enough of that, though, the game I am going to be talking about today is this:

Look at that sexy title screen!

Necropolisis an RPG in-development by Jude that is seeking to bring some NES-styled sexiness to the RM* community. You play as Marcus, a soldier who has been turned into an undead creature and wants to find out the reasons behind his transformation, become a human again and then bring down vengeance on those who cursed him. Sounds kinda generic, but I'm cool with that if the gameplay is good...

... which it seems like it will be because I'm really impressed with the concept that's being developed for the combat system. On the face of it, the custom battle-system (CBS) this game is going to introduce utilises a fairly common front-view, turn-based battle system. However, the game switches things up by making it so that skills and spells can be chained together into combinations. Over a series of three turns, your lone hero (something that is also fairly unique, come to think of it) can combine several skills together in order to perform "finishing moves". These moves are unlocked if you pull off a certain set of three skills in a row, meaning that balancing your combinations with healing requirements and the like (you don't have a cleric hanging around to heal you or anything like that!) becomes the focus of combat. I think this is really interesting and I can't wait to see how well it works in practice!

As for how the game looks, you can tell just by scrolling through the range of static screenshots, animated screenshots and gameplay videos available for this game that it's going to look absolutely amazing when it's done. The most surprising thing about the graphics, though, is how dark the game manages to come across as because, when you think back to how most RPGs looked on the NES, you'll probably remember colourful fantasy environments. This game doesn't have any of that and, if I'm being honest, it is the overall graphical style of this game, rather than the NES mimickry, that impresses me most. This game is absolutely dripping with style.

Overall, I'm really excited about this game, so I think you should all check it out and track its progress. The main webpage can be found here!